East gate lodge & entrance gates, Ballywalter Park, 15 Springvale Road, Springvale, Ballywalter, Newtownards, Co. Down, BT22 2PE

A single-storey Italianate gate lodge and matching gate screen built around 1850 by architect Charles Lanyon at the main eastern entrance to Ballywalter Park. The structures stand on the west side of Springvale Road, approximately half a mile south of Ballywalter, with a similar but plainer gate screen opposite on the eastern side of the road.

The Gate Lodge

The lodge is a perfectly symmetrical building on a cruciform plan, built in fawn-coloured sandstone and stucco. Its dominant feature is a three-arched porte-cochère on the south-facing elevation, with semicircular arches springing from square piers to scrolled keystones. The gable above the porch contains a roundel bearing the Mulholland crest, with an escallop gules. The sides of the porch feature shouldered arches and pierced balustrades. Paired scrolled brackets project to the eaves and are repeated as purlin ends to the gables. The side elevations contain tall semicircular-headed windows with margined glazing set into recesses, flanked by smaller subsidiary lights in Venetian style. A moulded stringcourse at arch springing level unites the composition. At the junction of ridges stands a large square panelled chimney stack with a bracketed cornice.

A large flat-roofed extension was added to the north-east corner in the 1990s, featuring two small windows in the style of the original and a timber and glazed rear door. A tall ward enclosing a yard at the south-east corner, presumed to date from the same period as the extension, has since been demolished. The building has been recently renovated but remains currently unoccupied.

The Entrance Gates

A few yards east of the lodge stand the main entrance gates. These consist of impressive walled quadrants contained by large stone pillars that frame iron railings. The railings contain matching robust decorative cast-iron spear-head gates flanking larger carriage gates. Each sandstone pillar is built up with deeply rusticated panelled blocks off a carved plinth, with a plain frieze surmounted by a moulded capping. Pretty scrolled volutes adorn the gate stops. Part of the quadrant wall on the north side has collapsed recently following impact from a vehicle, but stone from the wall has been preserved for reconstruction.

On the opposite side of Springvale Road directly across from this entrance stands another gate screen with much simpler, more understated pillars but containing similar spear-head gates. These pillars are flanked by railings on a low wall.

Historical Context

Ballywalter Park estate, originally known as Ballymagowan and then Springvale, was purchased by Belfast linen magnate Andrew Mulholland in 1846 for £23,500. Shortly after, Mulholland commissioned fellow Belfast city councillor Charles Lanyon to extend and remodel the existing Springvale House (built probably in the early eighteenth century and added to around 1810), and to add two gate lodges and the gates. This lodge design had previously been used by Lanyon at Eglantine in Hillsborough around 1845 and would be repeated at Moneyglass and Dunderave in County Antrim. Another lodge, possibly also by Lanyon, once stood at the original western entrance to the estate but has since been demolished.